Joey, a difficult night for you, I imagine?
Yeah, I thought they started really brightly and showed why they are everyone’s tip for promotion.
We kind of weathered that early part of the storm and then conceded just as we were getting over it.
I thought we settled after the first goal and we had a couple of half chances on the counter-attack. I thought Harvey Saunders showed a bit of naivety, he maybe should’ve done what their boy did and flung himself on the floor because Leif Davis at that point was last man and they might have been reduced to 10 men. He’s tried to stay on his feet and we don’t get rewarded in the modern game.
You see the boy with Alfie Kilgour. Alf says he doesn’t touch him and he throws himself to the floor and Alf is dismissed. Maybe we’ve got to get a bit cuter and utilise the opportunity to take the opponent down to 10 men.
I’m not one to advocate diving and cheating, but clearly at this level, you benefit from it. (Sam) Morsy pulls back Antony Evans after 10 minutes. It is probably the most blatant yellow card you’ll ever see and he doesn’t book him. Ten minutes after that, he pulls him back again and he books him for it.
I said to him at half time the first one was worse than the second one, and the ref accepted it. It doesn’t help us.
You need a bit of luck. Evo has a fantastic effort, it looks like it hits the angle of crossbar and post and comes back out. Trevor Clarke gets in there and maybe he could have hit it a bit cleaner, but again it’s a good shot. He hits it into the ground and it zips up and Walton makes a great save.
You have the Luca Hoole chance at the start of the second half. I think Harvey Saunders thinks he’s offside, but why he didn’t deflect it in I’m not sure because I don’t think Walton would have had any time to react. As it was, he moved out the way of it and it allows Walton to make the save.
Then they go up the other end and have a shot from distance that catches a wicked deflection and Belly is beaten by that.
That is effectively game over, 2-0 down here and I’m making a couple of substitutions with one eye on the Lincoln game on Saturday. In the midst of that, the two centre-halves in their infinite wisdom decide to get themselves dismissed from the pitch in two weird and wonderful ways.
Everything that could go wrong tonight… Harry Anderson breaks his toe after the first minute in a foul that he gives away.
Clearly, if you break your toe, it means someone’s stood on your foot and it’s one of those nights
A frustrating night for us. Everything that could go wrong kind of went wrong. Back to the drawing board.
If Alfie says he hasn’t touched him and the video shows that, would you consider appealing that?
Yeah, we’ll need to otherwise we’re going to be playing people who aren’t centre-halves at centre-half because we’ve got no available or fit centre-halves as of Tuesday night.
Is Gibson getting close or is it going to be too soon for him?
I don’t know. Hopefully, but Hooley can do a job there. We’ll figure something out, but it might be difficult for Lincoln to prepare for us, put it that way, but I imagine they’ll be lumping it straight forward from back to front and testing out our backline.
Joey, you often say goals change games and it felt like the goals you conceded came at pretty awful times. They were still in the ascendancy when they got the first goal, but you had weathered most of that storm. The second one, you had a bit of momentum and then a bit of a freak goal goes against you.
Yeah, it’s hard. You come here with the investments they’ve had in the team and the run that they’re on. You’re going to have to be as good as you can be and you maybe need a bit of luck along the way. Tonight, we haven’t had any.
You should take it out of the realms of luck, of course, but you need things to go for you and a player breaks his toe after a minute so the tactical plan… Harry was part of the strategy for us exiting from goal kicks and stuff like that.
And you obviously have the bounces of the ball, whether that’s Antony’s strike or the chances for Trev and Hooley either side. You need a bit of luck to go for you and we didn’t get it tonight.
That’s the disappointing thing, but we’ve got to take heart from if they are the top boys in the division and we’ve seen that with Portsmouth, sides that are expected to get promoted, we’re far short of what I think is out strongest team when we get people back and I think for us we have to take great heart from some of the problems we’ve posed to the teams who sit at the top of the table.
It doesn’t get us any extra points, but we’ve got to look at stuff that we can take salvation from.
It does feel like a difficult moment, Joey. You’ve got a lot of injuries and a few suspensions to add to that. You are five without a win now in the league. I know it’s early in the season but you are in a moment where you guys need to fight back and show a bit of siege mentality when a few things are going against you?
Yeah, for sure. That’s the thing if you draw a couple of home games.
We’ve got to remember what we’re doing this year. The reality is at this moment I wish we could compete with Ipswich and the like, but when they’re dropping £1.5million on a left-back and £800,000 here, they’ve got two teams in effect who are maybe players above the level, players who could get Championship moves. Certainly Wes Burns who we had at Fleetwood and I’m surprised they haven’t been tested for him.
It does show the reality of where we are now. We never came to a stadium like this last season in League Two and we’ve got to build blocks of our team.
It doesn’t help when we’ve got players who aren’t available via injury and it doesn’t help when I think we get stupid and needless sending-offs via our own stupidity.
Around 300 Gasheads made the trip tonight and it’s a really long trip and there is plenty going on in the world at the moment with the cost of living. You must be disappointed not to get a result for them but also proud that they do turn up for you?
They were superb. They’re clapping the lads off at the end because although we’ve lost 2-0 and gone down to nine men, I think they can see we’ve had a go.
I spoke to Kieran after the game and he said we’re one of the sides that’s come here and had a pop at them. Everyone else has just sat back and tried to stifle them and stifle the game.
We came here with a game plan to hurt them in transition, but it just wasn’t to be tonight.
There were nice messages of support for Marcus Stewart who is going through a lot at the moment with the diagnosis of MND. Last season you said you were playing with people on your shoulders, trying to do people proud, and Marcus came through at Rovers and is a product of the club. You’ll be looking to do him proud over the months ahead.
Yeah and he got a wonderful reception from both sets of fans. He was a big part of Ipswich’s story as well.
It’s not nice and you’ve had some terrible news with Rob Burrow, Nick Anderton, Stephen Darby. It’s just not fair. It’s a horrible part of life when people pick up illnesses and it’s something you wish you could have eradicated from humanity but unfortunately, we can’t and all we can do is support them the best we can.
I thought he got a wonderful reception and hopefully, supporters of football clubs on both sides can come around Marcus and his family and give them support at this tough time.
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